Cameron Davis
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Call in sick at work, but tell your family you’re going to work, and then spend the day at a local library just drawing.
Oh wait, wrong type of tip maybe? 🙂
Charlie – yep, that’s what I’ve found. The people who read the print comic don’t venture online to read comics on the web and the comics feel very different when read online compared to print. There’s very little overlap in the venn diagram.
Example: When I post longform comics on the Rose Facebook group there is very little interaction. When I post single panels or three panel strips or general conversational questions the interaction is fantastic. Reading long comics on a screen isn’t a thing my audience does.
It feels better in print, really, unless I start making a ton of three panel Rose strips.
The only one I did was on litreactor.com with an editor of Archie Comics doing a course about how to do a good comics pitch. I found it incredibly useful!
I get the same on my stats – I’m 99% sure it’s just the main front page. No idea why they confuse it with the /archives bit but there you go!
Thanks again, everyone, for your awesome feedback. Just wanted to update to let you know I completely scrapped the site and started again with a more conventional Comic Easel set up. I’m re-adding the comics again every Friday.
Hey everyone, wow, I’m floored by all the great and forthright feedback! I am so sorry I haven’t written back sooner. I had a Kickstarter to launch (successfully, yay) and a convention to attend to but now that’s all done I can get stuck back into the Rose site.
OK let’s address the big issues first that I can tackle this week.
The big pictures on the front page. My idea of having the front page resemble things like Pintrest is pretty divisive. It was also born out of the idea of making the front page also function as the archive, but a few weeks later and given this feedback I’m going to change it. Clay and Andy had a great point that the site loading was just going to get longer as I add more comics, which I guess works OK for an archive page, but not for a front page. I think I’m going to have a more introductory welcome page appear instead when you load the site. I’m thinking a piece of welcome text, an invite to read the latest comic, and a link to a cast page (oh yeah, I need a cast page). It’ll also load quicker and not have that percentage loader thingy so that’s a plus. I’ll have that up in the coming week.
Social icons on the side: I’ve added Facebook and Twitter links. For some reason this site theme (I purchased a commercial one and modified it to suit) doesn’t let me have an RSS feed so I guess I will have to manually create one every time I update the comic. I’ll work on that one this week.
Mobile design: As Mary correctly guessed, this is a site design geared towards mobile devices. The first week of Rose traffic bore out my hunch that most people view the internet on a mobile device of some sort, as 38% of visitors were on a phone, 22% on a tablet – that’s well over half my visitors! Blow The Cartridge skews a bit more towards desktop, but still.
That annoying X: I have no idea how to get rid of it. Working on it this week.
Next / previous buttons: Yeah, this really needs to be fixed pronto. It’s part of why I had those big images underneath each comic, especially given Rose’s non-linear nature I wanted to have something visual to get people to click but I need something more traditional too.
Store sorting options: Yeah, chalk that up to me to just installing woocommerce and not really spending time cleaning it up. I’ll sort it out this week.
OK, there is a LOT more in here to digest, and it’s all good stuff, but those are the ones I’ll be tackling first.
Thank you so much for your time and help! I owe you all ice creams.
I really like the site layout. I like the site concept. I really like how you’ve got a bunch of info about the game in question – a mini review, links to buy it, even yourself on YouTube playing it.
And the comics made me laugh a couple of times too, which is a plus 🙂
It’s a shame the comics aren’t in colour, though! I’d rather have a colour comic than a YouTube video, if it came to a choice.
Hope that helps!
Thanks for your feedback Brad and Pam, much appreciated! 🙂
Brad, I too am very eager to hear what people think. One part of me thinks I’m mad for doing almost everything different from the way that works (and has proven to work on my established webcomic). The other part is excited to see if this ends up catching on with people who don’t really read webcomics but do spend time on things like Pintrest.
Mary, thanks for the heads up about the navigation links being easy to miss. I’ve made them a bit darker and bigger to help them stand out. I’m going to see if I can remove that % countdown thing, now that you point it out it kind of bugs me too. Also – I think Rose is very much targeted towards women of all ages, so I’m glad to hear you like the actual comics!
One thing that I thought was interesting – Kris Straub gave his Patreon backers a day’s “early notice” on his latest Kickstarter project when it went live. It seemed to have worked pretty well.
Fantastic, thanks Obby! This turned out to be JUST what I was after. What a great little piece of code this is!
Funnily enough though, this plugin made all my .tif files STOP appearing as thumnbails (d’oh!) so I had to tell SageThumbs to not associate itself with .tif files, and then Windows went back to displaying them normally.
I also had to adjust SageThumbs to make it show thumbnails of Photoshop files larger than 10mb, but now that I’ve made those adjustments everything is working a treat!
Thanks again!
Picking up a random Archie book is guaranteed to do this for me. I’m always learning little things from those. Same for pretty much any British weekly kids comic like Beano or Whizzer & Chips.
Xaime Hernandez’s clean lines. Nabiel Kanan’s use of black and white. ANYTHING BY TERRY MOORE, good lord, talk about a master at the top of their craft.
Reading all of these gets me equally angry that I’m nowhere near as good, and excited to get back to drawing.
I’ve been making video games professionally for the best part of a decade while making comics at night, and lemme tell you, making comics is MUCH easier – and making comics is still BLOODY HARD WORK.
Plus making comics has the advantage of having a quick, routine “create / release / feedback” loop. Even a comic that is released once a week gives you a quicker creative outlet than a game that takes two years or more.
Just something to think about.
Thanks for the reminder! Grabbed the Joe Kubert (if it’s good enough for Dave Sim it’s good enough for me) and Scott McCloud ones and can’t wait to see which one fits the comic best.
About other comics: giant, 2000-word blog posts about how the artist was too busy / tired / sick / whatever to do the latest comic. YOU COULD HAVE MADE A COMIC IN THAT TIME AGH
About mine: How incredibly STIFF the art is. Ugh hate hate hate! Am working on fixing it…but it is a long road.
Yeah, I can definitely see that it’s improving, which is always nice to see!
One thing I think you should look at is the leading in your speech bubbles. There’s way too much space between lines, it almost looks like they’re separate paragraphs.
Galato Biafra got me, good one 🙂
